Saturday, April 30, 2016
Adventures in Woodworking
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| Over the next couple of months, I hope to chronicle how I build the King George II-inspired bookcase at left to replace our crappy old family room bookshelf at right. |
I’m always inspired by the things these people come up with, and just a bit envious of the amount of time they can spend in their shops. I go to bed afterwards with a renewed enthusiasm to not only get into my own shop and build the dozens of projects rattling around in my head, but to start my own Youtube channel and film my own adventures in woodworking.
But by the time Saturday afternoon rolls around, that enthusiasm has faded and after taking care of the 1001 little things that always seem to eat up my free time on the weekends, what little enthusiasm I have left is often killed off having to do yard work. (Forget the robot maid, what I really want is a robotic grounds crew to take care of my yard!)
Not every weekend is like that and I do manage to get a fair amount of shop-time in during the warmer weather here in the Northeast. But trying to film and edit those projects to produce a professional-looking video would just take up too much time I already don’t have.
Rather than just relegating that idea to the “Perhaps Someday” or “When I Retire” pile, I thought I’d try to document a complete project here in this blog.
Lately I’ve been struggling to come with interesting topics for each month’s column, and thought this might help me kill two birds with one virtual stone.
So this month, I’d thought I’d introduce you to the latest project I have in mind: A King George II inspired bookcase.
Since moving into our house 18 years ago, I’ve been meaning to replace a plain, cheap bookcase in our family room with something a bit better.
The particle board shelves have begun to sag under the weight of all the books and chachkies on it, it’s hard dust and all our old record albums are just stored in an old crate on top of it.
The picture of the King George II bookcase I found while browsing online looks like it could be adapted to hold all of our LPs in the squat cabinet on the bottom, while the glass-enclosed upper section would keep dust and dog hair off the books and chachkies, making dusting much easier. Plus the bookcase would match the style of the furniture in that room much better than the current one does.
So in the coming months, I’m going to cover how I go about turning this picture into a set of working plans in SketchUp (something I don’t usually do), my trials and tribulations trying to find the perfect materials for this (popular?cherry? mahogany?), then detail each step of the build from first cut, to finishing and installing it in the room.
So stay tuned. This should be an interesting ride…..
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